Is there an example scene where I can plug different shaders into the copier node for each object instanced/copied?

Simple problem. 3 objects, all with different shaders, I want them to exhibit those shaders after they're copied via the copier node.

I tried taking a look at the copier materialOverride example, but it's using one object as opposed to several, and when I try and recreate the network, the instanceObjectGroup won't hook into the surfaceShader dagSetMembers. Gives me a syntax error every time. Further whenever I try and interface with the output mesh in the node editor, it hard crashes my machine, making analyzing this scene file difficult.

That materialOverride scene first has vertex colors set on the objects being copied. Then using those vertex values to choose one of the colors to use(with a ramp). The instObjectGroup should be connected when you assign the final shader to the Copier out geo. Here's a scene doing that with MR and 4 objects. copier_vtxColor2shader.ma

Yep, you have to do a bit of prep-work before piping stuff to the copier. This way Maya takes care of object groups and stuff. Otherwise you have to do it all of that by yourself.

This example scene is actually very important, since it works around one of the biggest limitations in Maya - the rigidity of its shading engine. Using this or similar setup we can finally associate arbitrary shaders to instanced geometry by manipulating attributes during the copy-stamping process on the fly.

You may want to run this command in your scene: setAttr "ramp1.colorEntryList[2].position" 0.75;I tweaked the original one and will update the scenes archive later on.

Example was succinct and allowed for me to dick around with it till comprehension came. Like I said, I don't know why but the one in the Soup example scene file hard crashed my comp anytime I touched the output polysurface node in the node editor, so your scene was key.

You'll have to dive into the Renderman docs, you could also do what you want with Mental Ray and there is a production shader, I've been spending alot of time understanding Mental Ray. Most use vRay because it's easier, compared to Mental Ray and Renderman.

And the image is black. So I can't reconstruct the setup. Any help would be greatly appreciated, because my alternative is setting up several identical copiers. And that would be terribly slow. Thanks!

EDIT: I think I'm pretty close. Maybe someone wants to take a look at the attached scene.

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